I just finished reading Guns, Germs and Steel, in which Jared Diamond presents his basic thesis: that it was the shift from hunter-gatherers to food production (i.e., animal husbandry and agriculture), based upon fortunate geographical circumstances, that resulted in the emergence of today’s dominant human societies. If, like me—you’ve got a hunger for history and science—then you’ll find it deep and intellectually stimulating for its exploration of that topic alone.
What surprised me is how much of it inspires me with thoughts of our future technological and economic development. And I’ve concluded one thing: we’re still mostly hunter-gatherers in almost every way other than food.
Let’s take energy as one example. The vast majority of our energy is created because we travel from place to place, hoping to find a source of energy (sort of like our nomad ancestors who searched long and hard for the calories to gain from a few tubers, a few nuts, or a rare piece of meat). When we find the energy, we consume it, and it’s gone . The quest continues. We’re hunter-gatherers of energy. Right now, many scientists, engineers and businesspeople are trying to figure out how we can truly become producers (rather than gatherers) of energy—that’s what the whole cleantech and renewable energy industry is about. The possibility here is that in the long-term, we’ll spend far less of our aggregate human resources hunting and gathering energy—freeing up more people to do everything else that’s valuable to us.
Energy was one obvious case where we’re still in hunter-gatherer mode… but how about information? Certainly, we’ve come a long way on the distribution of information (the development of the alphabet, paper, the printing press and the Internet are great examples of this) but we’re still at the very beginning of becoming information producers. Scientists and engineers labor hard to discover information (information hunter-gatherers), and information services companies are in the business of cross-tabulating and aggregating information so that it can be applied to problems too thorny for individuals to uncover (which might be the primordial version of information production)—but my sense is that we’re still at the very beginning of making the shift
It took millennia for people to shift from hunter-gatherers to food production, so perhaps it will take a while. Applications like the new Wolfram Alpha are exciting to me because that’s the sort of technology that might enable an information-production age. The Semantic Web, which remains unrealized, is another. And social media such as Yelp, GamerDNA, Last.fm, etc. are good examples of software that can autonomously help individual people discover information that’s relevant by mining large amounts of consumer behavior.
The people who first leveraged food production to allow significant parts of their population to become bureaucrats, soldiers, priests and artisan could probably not possibly imagine the complex outcome of their actions: the rise of states, technology diffusion, literature, etc. What are the other parts of today’s economy that are still in hunter-gatherer mode, and what sort of things might we dare to imagine for the future?
Photo credit: this is a picture I took of a hunter-gatherer during a trip I made to Papua New Guinea; feel free to use however you like.
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